At 7:48 a.m. this morning, CBC Prince Edward Island reported Flu passing Island by again. Eight hours later, at 5:05 p.m. today, they reported P.E.I. struck by first flu outbreak in 2 years, make for an interesting juxtaposition on the CBC website:

Taken in the early morning light on the way to the office this morning:

We just finished a 15 minute voice chat from our hotel here in Halifax to my parents’ condo in Florida. They were using my Mom’s iBook and were dialed into an Earthlink account with the iBook’s internal modem; on our end was my MacBook connected by Ethernet. Using iChat voice quality was better-than-telephone, which seems like some amazing feat of technology.

They report, by the way, that Earthlink, which they signed up for when wifi was not in evidence, was easy to sign up for and works well. They especially mentioned the friendliness and efficiency of the Earthlink support staff.

I’m becoming a big fan of the Marriott Residence Inn here in Halifax.

It’s central — across from the Neptune Theatre, down the street from the Metro Centre, a short walk to Barrington St. and Spring Garden Road, only a few blocks from the waterfront, and surrounded by many excellent restaurants. You can walk almost anywhere downtown easily, and there are buses running everywhere else leaving from the next block over.

It’s relatively inexpensive — in the winter a “junior suite” (think “studio apartment with small kitchen, couch, easy chair, desk and queen bed”) is in the $139 range and there seem to be several deals that can bring this down lower. For example, we’re staying here this week with the “Cars Eat Free” promotion that gets of $75 worth of Petro Canada credit for gasoline and free indoor heated parking.

Breakfast is included in the rate, and it’s a good breakfast at that — a lot more than the “toast and juice” that passes for many hotel breakfasts. They even have a “make your own waffle bar” that was the hit of the visit when Oliver and I stayed here in 2004. And Uncommon Grounds, in the same building, is a coffee shop serving excellent cappuccino.

Staff are pleasant and helpful without being overly perky. Rooms are very clean and well-appointed. High-speed Internet is included (via Ethernet cord, which is provided).

We’ll stay here again.

I’ve hacked together a little PHP script, which I’ve called [[Plabaztag]], that makes our new Nabaztag rabbit announce my [[Plazes]] location every time it changes.

This means that while we’re here in [[Halifax]] and [[Oliver]] is at home in [[Charlottetown]] and we go out to dinner, our rabbit pipes up and says something like “Peter is now at The Hungry Chili in Halifax.”

Now that we’ve been gone a couple of days this may be driving Nana and Poppa crazy, but Oliver seems to continue to be delighted by the idea of a rabbit telling him where we are.

I know I am.

You can find code and basic instructions for using it in the Rukapedia.

[[Catherine]] and I are in Halifax for three days this week while [[Oliver]] is in the loving care of his Nana and Poppa back at home. This will be the longest that both of us have been away from wee O since, well, ever. He seemed quite non-plussed by the prospect of our extended absence; his only concern, according to Catherine, was that we be back in time for Valentine’s Day.

We’re using our time here in the Big City to do all the things one can’t do back in the Little City. Like eating chili-pepper infused food, Turkish mezes and drinking good coffee, shopping for organic cotton boxer shorts (well, not exactly “shopping,” more “marveling at the sheer variety of stuff on sale here”).

Our rabbit arrived this week from ThingGeek via DHL courier.

It actually arrived at our house at around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, but [[Catherine]] was out, and she found the DSL “door knocker” on our front door when she returned.

I followed the instructions on the door knocker and went to the DHL website, entered the “door knocker number” and requested delivery on Friday to my office.

When nothing had arrived by Friday at lunch, I called the DHL toll-free number to confirm that my request had “taken.” After a transfer to the Canadian operation, an agent confirmed that there was no record at all of my web request; he submitted it manually, and said it could be Monday before my rabbit arrived at the office.

With no rabbit at the end of business on Friday, on a lark I called DHL back and spoke to a much more helpful agent who gave me the address of the local DHL station here in [[Charlottetown]] and told me I could simply try going there to see if my package was there.

It turned out that the station is located at 7 Mount Edward Road (although you won’t find any record of this in Google) in behind K&M Home Heating and next door to the old Wizard store. It’s only open two hours a day, one in the early morning and one in the afternoon, and it’s not really set up at all for customers to just “drop by” as it’s only a warehouse.

That said, I found two very helpful drivers unloading packages from a cube van, and they quickly located my rabbit. I paid the COD with a credit card, and I was off.

I bought an Apple Mighty Mouse a year and half ago, one in a long series of pointing devices I’ve owned over the years.

Until recently I’d been completely happy with the mouse: it’s compact, fits nicely in my hand, and it’s “scroll nub” works well.

That is, until recently. For the last month I’ve been battling my Mighty Mouses’ scroll nub’s tendency to not want to scroll “down.” It would scroll up just fine, but some days it would just plain refuse to scroll down. Word on the street is that this is a simple matter of “gunk in the works” and so I followed the office Apple cleaning instructions. And, indeed, this worked for a while.

But the situation got progressively worse over the last couple of weeks, to the point where no amount of rolling and blowing and sucking could make my mouse happy.

On Friday, in desperation, I turned to the well-illustrated Mighty mouse gutting and cleaning page, and proceeded to tenderly rip my mouse apart.

Inside the works I did, indeed, find some gunk. Not loads and loads of gunk, but perhaps enough to explain the no-scrolling problem.

After a thorough cleaning, I put things back together.

And the mouse no longer worked.

Although I have aspirations to electronics nerd-dom, I can seldom pull it off very effectively (I recall an unfortunate incident in my Datsun 510 wherein green smoke filled the cabin after I attempted to self-install a cassette player). So obviously somewhere in my mouse gutting I took a wrong turn, lopped off an important nerve, and rendered the mouse dead.

Angry at Apple for selling me a seemingly uncleanable product, I exacted revenge by driving out to Staples and buying an Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 5000. It was easy to install, and I used it for the following 24 hours.

Unfortunately, in addition to lacking a snazzy pop-culture-referencing name, the 5000 felt like driving an Armoured Personnel Carrier to work: it didn’t fit in my hand, its scroll wheel felt like weightlifting compared to the scroll nub, it didn’t glide well across my desk, and the giant radio receiver it required took up valuable desk real estate. I had to stop using it after a day simply because my hand started to hurt and I couldn’t go on.

Having now forgiven Apple (or being sucked back inside the reality distortion field), I returned the Microsoft mouse to Staples and picked up the snazzy new Bluetooth version of the Mighty Mouse at Little Mac Shoppe for $30 more.

I paired it up with my MacBook and it worked right away. It felt like coming home: smooth scrolling, easy-glide action, comfortable in my hand.

I’ve no doubt that this mouse will gunk up after a while. And its wirelessness means that I may end up throwing it across the room in frustration when and if that happens. But in the meantime I’ve got my groove back.

Dan Misener reports on how to keep your glasses from fogging up. I haven’t tried this yet, but if it works it will be a tremendous improvement to my daily routine: every weekday morning I walk into some coffee shop or another and spend the first 5 minutes virutally blind from the sudden fog-up of my glasses due to the near-tropical conditions maintained in said shops (it’s the radiant heat from all those muffins, I suppose).

I came to glasses-wearing relatively late in life, and I still don’t actually consider myself a bona fide glasses wearer (even though I can no longer function without them). So tips like this, which perhaps those that wore glasses from childhood figured out, are very helpful to me.

They used to say that you could tell a lot about the Clinton administration by the flow of after-hours pizza deliveries to the White House.

Well this morning on the way to work I ended up walking along behind Shawn Murphy, MP for Charlottetown and an assistant on their way into the office following a stop at Tim Hortons:

Shawn was carrying a box of Timbits and the man walking beside him was carrying 8 cups of Tim Hortons coffee stacked up in two trays.

With that much coffee and sugar being pumped into the office, obviously something’s afoot. Watch out Stephen Harper: Shawn’s bunch are on your tail.